NEVERENDING
FILM FESTIVAL
#373
Be Pretty and Shut Up (1981)
I Heard It through the Grapevine (1982)
I Love Sarah Jane (2008)
I Married a Witch (1942)
The Singing Detective (1986)
Be Pretty and Shut Up (1981)
This is a French documentary, interviewing 22 film actresses about what it’s like to work in such a male-dominated industry. There are hints of harassment, but the world wasn’t ready for #MeToo in 1981. The conversations are mostly about subtler outrages.
Female characters are rarely written to be smart or power the plot, and most directors and most everyone behind the scenes is a man, so films end up telling men’s stories from men’s perspectives. An ordinary film might have 3-5 ‘major’ roles, and most will be men. Which gets a tad tiresome for women. Or for men who’d like to see better movies.
A recurring question that keeps coming up, and the answer keeps being no, is: “Have you had roles where you had significant scenes with other women?” And of course, as women approach the dreaded 30s, roles become smaller and fewer, as the next crop of pretty 19-year-old starlets arrive.
Among the actresses known to me in this film, there’s Jenny Agutter, Ellen Burstyn, Candy Clark, Jill Clayburgh, Patti D’Arbanville, Louise Fletcher, Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine, Millie Perkins, Maria Schneider, Barbara Steele, Susan Tyrrell, and Cindy Williams. There are more European stars, less familiar.
The filmmaker and the film are French. Everything gets English-language subtitles, even the actresses speaking English, but the problem is, English-speakers are also translated on-screen by another voice, presumably the director. She speaks over the actresses, in French, which makes the English sections frustrating to follow, even with subtitles. Also, the subtitles for the English sections sometimes leave out details for brevity, which makes me question what might be missing from the subtitles for the French stuff.
It’s still worth watching and pondering, though. Most of these women come off well in any language, and they’re clearly more intelligent than most of the roles they played. Some seem frickin’ brilliant — Burstyn and Fonda, especially. A gentle surprise is that Jane Fonda did her entire interview in fluent, eloquent French.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
I Heard It through the Grapevine (1982)
From the title, what would you expect this to be? A prison drama, perhaps, or a biopic of the Pips? Nope.
It’s 1980, and writer/activist James Baldwin has returned from his self-imposed exile in France to visit old friends from the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and ’70s. Baldwin and friends revisit the sites of old protests and battles, as they share memories and outrages.
Most of the audience wasn’t there when the original events happened, so it would be helpful if each walk or talk started with a quick, one-paragraph recap of the pertinent history. Nope, figure it out for yourself.
When people speak to the camera or to Baldwin in 1980, you’ll wait for introductions or words on the screen telling you who’s talking. Nope, you’re supposed to know without being told. If you’re not a historian, you’re adrift. Baldwin and some vintage shots of Malcolm and Martin are the only faces I recognized.
Some of these unidentified people have sharp insights to what’s gone right and wrong since the 1960s, and the footage from ’60s protests and riots is always moving/infuriating. It’s probably not possible to make a bad documentary about the civil rights movement, but jeez, this flick sure tries.
Verdict: YES, despite bewildering moviemaking mistakes.
♦ ♦ ♦
I Love Sarah Jane (2008)
I audibly groaned a few minutes into this, when I realized it’s a zombie movie. Zombies are such a tired concept.
We’re in Australia after the apocalypse, and the only survivors are teenagers. Sarah Jane is one of them, and a youngish boy has a crush on her, but she’s tougher than overcooked beef, and he’s about 12 so nothing’s happening there. A sense of humor is at play as the kids taunt a zombie that’s kept on a chain in the yard, but the closing credits rolled just as I was starting to like the movie.
Wha—? Ah jeez, it’s not a movie, it’s a short. 14 minutes and out. Give these guys (Spencer Susser & David Michod) a budget to expand the idea to feature length, and I’ll bet it would be good.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
I Married a Witch (1942)
French director Rene Clair made this in English, and it’s very fluffy and lightweight, similar in tone to his first English-language film, The Flame of New Orleans. He made terrific stuff in French, but this is more mundane.
A witch (Veronica Lake) and her father (Cecil Kellaway) seek to enforce a centuries-long curse on an New England blueblood (Fredric March), but through spellcasting oopsies the witch and the blueblood fall in love.
It’s like a present-day porno with better acting and no nudity — Ms Lake is supernaturally pretty and insistent on seducing Mr March, who implausibly resists like a good stepbrother. Later she sings, badly but only briefly.
Minimal but credible special effects, but it’s too fairy tale for me.
Verdict: MAYBE.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Singing Detective (1986)
Dennis Potter was dead before I knew who he was, but he made a lot of good British telly, and of all I’ve seen — Cold Lazarus, and bits of Christabel and That Was the Week That Was — none has disappointed me yet. He wrote this six-part BBC miniseries, and it’s unique, never what’s expected.
Michael Gambon stars as Philip Marlow, but not the detective. It’s spelled differently, see. This Marlow is a writer of cheap detective novels, but he’s never had much success at it, and now he’s hospitalized with psoriatic arthritis, which eats at the skin and joints.
It’s the 1950s, and Marlow is too poor to have a private room, so he’s stuck in a ward with a dozen other men, all of whom he dislikes. He’s cynical, mean, gruesomely sick, and with nothing else to do, he starts writing his next novel.
But he can’t hold a pen, so he works out the plot in his head, and every episode slips into and out of his unwritten noir mystery, and the indignities of medical uncaring care in the hospital.
Does it sound like fun yet? Well, there’s also a subplot about a grade-school boy who poops on the teacher’s desk. And once or twice in every episode, someone bursts into a poorly-dubbed pop song from the 1950s.
“Solutions. All solutions and no clues — that’s what the dumb-heads want. If rather it was the other way ’round, all clues and no solutions, that’s the way things really are.”
The Singing Detective plays with real reality and the reality within the fiction, and challenges the audience to figure things out. If you’re up for the challenge, it’s remarkable television.
Same as with Cold Lazarus, many of the actors have peculiar faces, the kind you rarely see in show biz. I’m imagining that Potter sat in the casting calls, turning away anyone who looked ordinary.
Verdict: BIG YES.
5/14/2025
Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.
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